Eugene was not quite sixteen years old when he was sent away to the university. He was, at the time, over six feet and three inches tall, and weighed perhaps 130 pounds. He had been sick very little in his life, but his rapid growth had eaten sharply at his strength: he was full of a wild energy of mind and body that devoured him and left him exhausted. He tired very quickly.
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He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal. Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. Again and again he had been bogged in the gray slough of factuality. His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his packed and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination. He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his life. He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women. He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.
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She looked a moment at his long thin figure and turned to John Dorsey Leonard with wet eyes:
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When it was at last plain that Gant's will was on this inflexible, Margaret Leonard had said, quietly:
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"Eugene," she continued, "we could not love you more if you were our own child. We wanted to keep you with us for another year, but since that cannot be, we are sending you out with our hopes pinned to you. Oh, boy, you are fine. There is no atom in you that is not fine. A glory and a chrism of bright genius rest upon you. God bless you: the world is yours."
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"Do you remember that shaver in knee-pants who came to us four years ago? Can you believe it?"
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She took his trembling hand gently between her own lean fingers. He lowered his head and closed his eyelids tightly.
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"Well, then, go your ways, boy. Go your ways. God bless you."
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Four years later, when he was graduated, he had passed his adolescence, the kiss of love and death burned on his lips, and he was still a child.
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"What do you know about it?" he said.
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When Margaret turned to him again her voice, low and gentle, was charged with the greatest passion he had ever heard in it.
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"You are taking a part of our heart with you, boy. Do you know that?"
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John Dorsey Leonard laughed quietly, with weary gentle relaxation.
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The proud words of love and glory sank like music to his heart, evoking their bright pictures of triumph, and piercing him with the bitter shame of his concealed desires. Love bade him enter, but his soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin.
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He tore his hand from her grasp, clinching, with the strangled cry of an animal, his convulsive throat.
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"I can't!" he choked. "You mustn't think --" He could not go on; his life groped blindly to confessional.
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Later, after he left her, her light kiss upon his cheek, the first she had ever given him, burned like a ring of fire.
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That summer he was closer to Ben than ever before. They occupied the same room at Woodson Street. Luke had returned to the Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen's marriage.
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Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. She looked after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial tenderness. At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of his brother's voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette in darkness.
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The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant he spoke hardly at all. They had never talked together. Their eyes never met -- a great shame, the shame of father and son, that mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their hearts, had silenced them.
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"I suppose they've told you how poor they are?" he began, tossing his cigarette away.
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But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they sat upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant's life burst out in violent denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting over his words as he did when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became more passionate.
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"Well," said Eugene, "I've got to go easy. I mustn't waste my money."
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"Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like that."
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"Ah-h!" said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a thin and bitter contortion of his lips.
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Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping himself on his thin hairy forearm.
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"For YOU, you little idiot!" said Ben, scowling at him in disgust. "They're doing it all for themselves. Don't let them get away with that. They think you'll make good and bring a lot of credit to them some day. They're rushing you into it two years too soon, as it is. No, you take everything you can get. The rest of us never had anything, but I want to see you get all that's coming to you. My God!" he cried furiously. "Their money's doing no one any good rotting in the damned bank, is it? No, 'Gene, get all you can. When you get down there, if you find you need more to hold your own with the other boys, make the old man give it to you. You've never had a chance to hold your head up in your own home town, so make the most of your chances when you get away."
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"Well, I appreciate what they're doing. I'm getting a lot more than the rest of you had. They're doing a lot for me," said the boy.
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"Now listen, 'Gene," he said sternly, "don't be a damned little fool, do you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of them," he added savagely.
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He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence for a moment.
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And these buffooneries -- a little cruel, but only with the cruelty of vacant laughter, and a part of the schedule of rough humor in an American college -- salty, extravagant, and national -- opened deep wounds in him, which his companions hardly suspected. He was conspicuous at once not only because of his blunders, but also because of his young wild child's face, and his great raw length of body, with the bounding scissor legs. The undergraduates passed him in grinning clusters: he saluted them obediently, but with a sick heart. And the smug smiling faces of his own classmen, the wiser Freshmen, complacently guiltless of his own mistakes, touched him at moments with insane fury.
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"To hell with it all!" he said. "What in God's name are we living for!"
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Eugene's first year at the university was filled for him with loneliness, pain, and failure. Within three weeks of his matriculation, he had been made the dupe of a half-dozen classic jokes, his ignorance of all campus tradition had been exploited, his gullibility was a byword. He was the greenest of all green Freshmen, past and present: he had listened attentively to a sermon in chapel by a sophomore with false whiskers; he had prepared studiously for an examination on the contents of the college catalogue; and he had been guilty of the inexcusable blunder of making a speech of acceptance on his election, with fifty others, to the literary society.
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As he walked across the campus, he heard his name called mockingly from a dozen of the impartial windows, he heard the hidden laughter, and he ground his teeth. And at night, he stiffened with shame in his dark bed, ripping the sheet between his fingers as, with the unbalanced vision, the swollen egotism of the introvert, the picture of a crowded student-room, filled with the grinning historians of his exploits, burned in his brain. He strangled his fierce cry with a taloned hand. He wanted to blot out the shameful moment, unweave the loom. It seemed to him that his ruin was final, that he had stamped the beginning of his university life with folly that would never be forgotten, and that the best he could do would be to seek out obscurity for the next four years. He saw himself in his clown's trappings and thought of his former vision of success and honor with a lacerating self-contempt.
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"Smile and smile and s-mile -- damn you!" he cursed through his grating teeth. For the first time in his life he began to dislike whatever fits too snugly in a measure. He began to dislike and envy the inconspicuous mould of general nature -- the multitudinous arms, legs, hands, feet, and figures that are comfortably shaped for ready-made garments. And the prettily regular, wherever he found it, he hated -- the vacantly handsome young men, with shining hair, evenly parted in the middle, with sure strong middling limbs meant to go gracefully on dancefloors. He longed to see them commit some awkward blunder -- to trip and sprawl, to be flatulent, to lose a strategic button in mixed company, to be unconscious of a hanging shirt-tail while with a pretty girl. But they made no mistakes.
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There was no one to whom he could turn: he had no friends. His conception of university life was a romantic blur, evoked from his reading and tempered with memories of Stover at Yale, Young Fred Fearnot, and jolly youths with affectionate linked arms, bawling out a cheer-song. No one had given him even the rudimentary data of the somewhat rudimentary life of an American university. He had not been warned of the general taboos. Thus, he had come greenly on his new life, unprepared, as he came ever thereafter on all new life, save for his opium visions of himself a stranger in Arcadias.
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He was alone. He was desperately lonely.
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But the university was a charming, an unforgettable place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big State. Students came and departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter, twelve miles away: the countryside was raw, powerful and ugly, a rolling land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried in a pastoral wilderness, on a long tabling butte, which rose steeply above the country. One burst suddenly, at the hill-top, on the end of the straggling village street, flanked by faculty houses, and winding a mile in to the town centre and the university. The central campus sloped back and up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent ancient trees. A quadrangle of post-Revolutionary buildings of weathered brick bounded the upper end: other newer buildings, in the modern bad manner (the Pedagogic Neo-Greeky), were scattered around beyond the central design: beyond, there was a thickly forested wilderness. There was still a good flavor of the wilderness about the place -- one felt its remoteness, its isolated charm. It seemed to Eugene like a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast.
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Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the forest, had given the university a sweetness and a beauty it was later to forfeit. It had the fine authority of provincialism -- the provincialism of an older South. Nothing mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich kingdom -- there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world.
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In this pastoral setting a young man was enabled to loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years. There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness. Instead, they loafed and invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted the affairs of glee-clubs, athletic teams, class politics, fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs. And they talked -- always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms, they talked -- in limp sprawls -- incessant, charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics, athletics, fraternities and the girls -- My God! how they talked!
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Few of the university's sons had been distinguished in the nation's life -- there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one's State. Nothing beyond mattered very much.
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"Observe," lisped Mr. Torrington, the old Rhodes Scholar (Pulpit Hill and Merton, '14), "observe how skilfully he holds suspense until the very end. Observe with what consummate art he builds up to his climax, keeping his meaning hidden until the very last word." Further, in fact.
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At last, thought Eugene, I am getting an education. This must be good writing, because it seems so very dull. When it hurts, the dentist says, it does you good. Democracy must be real, because it is so very earnest. It must be a certainty, because it is so elegantly embalmed in this marble mausoleum of language. Essays For College Men -- Woodrow Wilson, Lord Bryce and Dean Briggs.
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But there was no word here of the loud raucous voice of America, political conventions and the Big Brass Band, Tweed, Tammany, the Big Stick, lynching bees and black barbecue parties, the Boston Irish, and the damnable machinations of the Pope as exposed by the Babylon Hollow Trumpet (Dem.), the rape of the Belgian virgins, rum, oil, Wall Street and Mexico.
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"Mr. —? Mr. —? —" he said, fumbling at his index cards.
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"Gant," said Eugene.
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Mr. Torrington smiled moistly at Eugene and urged him tenderly into a chair drawn intimately to his desk.
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Did he like to read? Ah -- that was good. He was so glad to hear it. The true university in these days, said Carlyle (he did hope Eugene liked rugged old Thomas), was a collection of books.
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"Ah, yes -- Mr. Gant," he smiled his contrition. "Now -- about your outside reading?" he began.
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All that, Mr. Torrington would have said, was temporary and accidental. It was unsound.
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"Yes, sir," said Eugene.
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That, it seemed to him, was the Oxford Plan. Oh, yes -- he had been there, three years, in fact. His mild eye kindled. To loaf along the High on a warm Spring day, stopping to examine in the bookseller's windows the treasures that might be had for so little. Then to Buol's or to a friend's room for tea, or for a walk in the meadows or Magdalen gardens, or to look down into the quad, at the gay pageant of youth below. Ah -- Ah! A great place? Well -- he'd hardly say that. It all depended what one meant by a great place. Half the looseness in thought -- unfortunately, he fancied, more prevalent among American than among English youth -- came from an indefinite exuberance of ill-defined speech.
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But what, thought Eugene, about my inside reading?
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"Yes, sir," said Eugene.
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A great place? Well, he'd scarcely say that. The expression was typically American. Butter-lipped, he turned on the boy a smile of soft unfriendliness:
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"It kills," he observed, "a man's useless enthusiasms."
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"That's fine," he said.
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Eugene whitened a little.
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Now -- let him see. Did he like plays -- the modern drama? Excellent. They were doing some very interesting things in the modern drama. Barrie -- oh, a charming fellow! What was that? Shaw!
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"Oh, but really! My dear boy!" said Mr. Torrington with gentle amazement. He shrugged his shoulders and became politely indifferent. Very well, if he liked. Of course, he thought it rather a pity to waste one's time so when they were really doing some first-rate things. That was JUST the trouble, however. The appeal of a man like that was mainly to the unformed taste, the uncritical judgment. He had a flashy attraction for the immature. Oh, yes! Undoubtedly an amusing fellow. Clever -- yes, but hardly significant. And -- didn't he think -- a trifle noisy? Or had he noticed that? Yes -- there was to be sure an amusing Celtic strain, not without charm, but unsound. He was not in line with the best modern thought.
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"Yes, sir," said Eugene. "I've read all the others. There's a new book out."
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"I'll take the Barrie," said Eugene.
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Yes, he rather thought that would be better.
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"Gant."
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"Yes, sir," said Eugene, backing feverishly to the door. When he felt the open space behind him, he fell through it, and vanished.
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"Well, good day. Mr. -- Mr. —? —?" he smiled, fumbling again with his cards.
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Oh yes, to be sure -- Gant. He held out his plump limp hand. He did hope Mr. Gant would call on him. Perhaps he'd be able to advise him on some of the little problems that, he knew, were constantly cropping up during the first year. Above all, he mustn't get discouraged.
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God save our King and Queen!
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Anyway, he thought grimly, I've read all the damned Barries. I'll write the damned report for him, and damned well read what I damn well please.
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He had courses besides in Chemistry, Mathematics, Greek, and Latin.
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He worked hard and with interest at his Latin. His instructor was a tall shaven man, with a yellow saturnine face. He parted his scant hair cleverly in such a way as to suggest horns. His lips were always twisted in a satanic smile, his eyes gleamed sideward with heavy malicious humor. Eugene had great hopes of him. When the boy arrived, panting and breakfastless, a moment after the class had settled to order, the satanic professor would greet him with elaborate irony: "Ah there, Brother Gant! Just in time for church again. Have you slept well?"
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"Bravo, Brother Gant! Excellent! Splendid! You are riding a good pony -- but a little too smoothly, my boy. You ride a little too well."
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"And now, I am going to request Brother Gant to favor us with one of his polished and scholarly translations."
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The class roared its appreciation of these subtleties. And later, in an expectant pause, he would deepen his arched brows portentously, stare up mockingly under his bushy eyebrows at his expectant audience, and say, in a deep sardonic voice:
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These heavy jibes were hard to bear because, of all the class, two dozen or more, Brother Gant was the only one to prepare his work without the aid of a printed translation. He worked hard on Livy and Tacitus, going over the lesson several times until he had dug out a smooth and competent reading of his own. This he was stupid enough to deliver in downright fashion, without hesitation, or a skilfully affected doubt here and there. For his pains and honesty he was handsomely rewarded by the Amateur Diabolist. The lean smile would deepen as the boy read, the man would lift his eyes significantly to the grinning class, and when it was over, he would say:
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"See here, sir! See here!" he began in a voice choking with fury and exasperation. "Sir -- I assure you --" he thought of all the grinning apes in the class, palming off profitably their stolen translations, and he could not go on.
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The Devil's Disciple was not a bad man; he was only, like most men who pride themselves on their astuteness, a foolish one.
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When he could stand it no longer, he sought the man out one day after the class.
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"But --" Eugene began explosively.
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"Nonsense, Mr. Gant," said he kindly. "You don't think you can fool me on a translation, do you? It's all right with me, you know," he continued, grinning. "If you'd rather ride a pony than do your own work, I'll give you a passing grade -- so long as you do it well."
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The class sniggered heavily.
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"But I think it's a pity, Mr. Gant," said the professor, gravely, "that you're willing to slide along this way. See here, my boy, you're capable of doing first-rate work. I can see that. Why don't you make an effort? Why don't you buckle down and really study, after this?"
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And privately, he would say: "You see the difference, don't you? I knew at once when you stopped using that pony. Your translation is not so smooth, but it's your own now. You're doing good work, my boy, and you're getting something out of it. It's worth it, isn't it?"
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Eugene stared at the man, with tears of anger in his eyes. He sputtered but could not speak. But suddenly, as he looked down into the knowing leer, the perfect and preposterous injustice of the thing -- like a caricature -- overcame him: he burst into an explosive laugh of rage and amusement which the teacher, no doubt, accepted as confession.
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"Well, what do you say?" he asked. "Will you try?"
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"All right! Yes!" the boy yelled. "I'll try it."
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He bought at once a copy of the translation used by the class. Thereafter, when he read, faltering prettily here and there over a phrase, until his instructor should come to his aid, the satanic professor listened gravely and attentively, nodding his head in approval from time to time, and saying, with great satisfaction, when he had finished: "Good, Mr. Gant. Very good. That shows what a little real work will do."
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By far the most distinguished of his teachers this first year was Mr. Edward Pettigrew ("Buck") Benson, the Greek professor. Buck Benson was a little man in the middle-forties, a bachelor, somewhat dandified, but old-fashioned, in his dress. He wore wing collars, large plump cravats, and suede-topped shoes. His hair was thick, heavily grayed, beautifully kept. His face was courteously pugnacious, fierce, with large yellow bulging eyeballs, and several bulldog pleatings around the mouth. It was an altogether handsome ugliness.
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"Yes," said Eugene gratefully, "it certainly is --"
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His voice was low, lazy, pleasant, with an indolent drawl, but without changing its pace or its inflection he could flay a victim with as cruel a tongue as ever wagged, and in the next moment wipe out hostility, restore affection, heal all wounds by the same agency. His charm was enormous. Among the students he was the subject for comical speculation -- in their myths, they made of him a passionate and sophisticated lover, and his midget cycle-car, which bounded like an overgrown toy around the campus, the scene of many romantic seductions.
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He was a good Grecian -- an elegant indolent scholar. Under his instruction Eugene began to read Homer. The boy knew little grammar -- he had learned little at Leonard's -- but, since he had had the bad judgment to begin Greek under some one other than Buck Benson, Buck Benson thought he knew even less than he did. He studied desperately, but the bitter dyspeptic gaze of the elegant little man frightened him into halting, timorous, clumsy performances. And as he proceeded, with thumping heart and tremulous voice, Buck Benson's manner would become more and more weary, until finally, dropping his book, he would drawl:
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"Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could throw you out the window."
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But that which remained most vividly, later, in the drowning years which cover away so much of beauty, was the vast sea-surge of Homer which beat in his brain, his blood, his pulses, as did the sea-sound in Gant's parlor shells, when first he heard it to the slowly pacing feet and the hexametrical drawl of Buck Benson, the lost last weary son of Hellas.
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But, on the examination, he gave an excellent performance, and translated from sight beautifully. He was saved. Buck Benson commended his paper publicly with lazy astonishment, and gave him a fair grade. Thereafter, they slipped quickly into an easier relation: by Spring, he was reading Euripides with some confidence.
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Dwaney de clangay genett, argereoyo beeoyo -- above the whistle's shriek, the harsh scream of the wheel, the riveter's tattoo, the vast long music endures, and ever shall. What dissonance can quench it? What jangling violence can disturb or conquer it -- entombed in our flesh when we were young, remembered like "the apple tree, the singing, and the gold"?
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